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VICTORIA — When Energy Minister Bill Bennett laid out his plan to restore BC Hydro finances to a more sustainable footing Tuesday, he also provided a step-by-step critique of how the governing B.C. Liberals have mismanaged the giant public utility.

Short-term meddling in rates that postponed a financial reckoning for political reasons? Bennett tacitly admitted to the existence of that problem by announcing a realistic schedule of rate increases over the next 10 years.

Siphoning huge dividends out of the company to pay for government programs, thereby forcing Hydro to borrow to pay for its own infrastructure and to raise rates to cover the interest?

Bennett went with the critics on that front as well, when he conceded that government will have to stop wringing dividends from Hydro in the not too distant future.

Reckless use of deferral accounts to put off billions of dollars worth of current day spending for repayment in future years?

Guilty as charged. Bennett announced that the balances in the deferral accounts, which have grown 10-fold from half a billion dollars to $5 billion in recent years, will be capped, then paid down over time.

Bennett tipped his hat to the critics on that one when he allowed as how the BCUC will be empowered to once again regulate electricity rates.

Giving Hydro carte blanche to load up on staff, projects and debt, mostly free of outside scrutiny? Those days are coming to an end, Bennett indicated, as he announced further cuts in operational and capital spending, with an eye to capping the growth in the debt, then starting to pay it down.

But for all the steps that Bennett took in the right direction — or, at least, promised to take — his 10-year plan was not without its negatives.

Hydro ratepayers will pay the price for all those years when the government was kicking the can down the road. Targeted rate increases amount to 28 per cent compounded over the first five years, 45 per cent over the full 10 years.

Even at that, the Liberals had to establish yet another account to defer some current spending to future years. Without it, the rate increase in the first year would have been 14 per cent instead of the projected nine.

The deferred balance in this newly concocted “rate smoothing account,” as it has been dubbed, will grow to $1 billion five years hence, before it is paid off at the end of the 10 years.

Nor will the utilities commission be brought back into the picture straightaway. The government intends to impose the first two rate increases (the nine per cent, followed by six) by cabinet order.

The commission itself will be subject to the core review process to determine whether it has the qualified staff and procedural efficiency to scrutinize electricity rates. Only in the third year will it be allowed to resume regulating rates, and then under a government-imposed cap.

Nor did Bennett indicate when the commission will be restored to the full independence that would allow it to vet such debatable ventures as Power Smart, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars on feel-good conservation measures, or Powerex, which this year cost taxpayers three quarters of a billion dollars on an electricity trading scheme with California.

Taxpayers can only hope that the commission is freed to do its job on the proposal to build a hydroelectric dam at Site C on the Peace River, lately costed at $8 billion. (Bennett told reporters Tuesday he’s comfortable with the number.)

Site C figures in another potential delaying action, for if the project goes ahead, the government intends to defer the full tab, all $8 billion of it, until the project actually begins producing electricity. That won’t happen until 2025 at the earliest, according to Bennett.

Continuing on the theme of delayed action, the government doesn’t plan to reduce the annual dividend it takes from Hydro until after the 2017 provincial election and it won’t be completely weaned off until after the following election in 2021.

Bennett rightly noted how the government will reduce its dividends from Hydro by $2 billion over the 10 years. But to keep things in perspective, one should also note that government will nevertheless take $6 billion from Hydro over the same period, through a combination of dividends and charges on water rentals.

The Liberal plan for Hydro’s debt shows a similar arc. Yes, they intend to cap the debt and eventually shrink it. But first they’ll let it grow from the current $14 billion to $20 billion, before bringing it back down to $17 billion by the end of the 10-year period.

So to recap, for all the good intentions in Bennett’s plan, the pain for ratepayers is right there at the front end, the worthy accomplishments are largely postponed until the later years when this government may have long since passed its best-before date.

Still, give him credit for spelling out his targets for the full 10 years. “You now have something from which you can hold us to account going forward,” said Bennett, in another reminder of what’s been missing from Liberal planning on electricity rates in recent years.

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